Climate change and windstorm losses in Poland in the twenty-first century

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although windstorms are not as spectacular as large, fluvial floods, they cause significant losses every year. Due to the difficulties in measuring this damage, the literature on the impact of climate change on it is relatively scarce. The aim of this paper is to estimate the impact of climate change on losses caused by windstorms in Poland over the twenty-first century. To do that, damage over threshold methodology is applied, in which losses depend on how much a given threshold is exceeded. In line with existing literature, the 98th percentile threshold and cubic damage function are applied to the data on the wind speed of gust from EURO-CORDEX simulations. As a result, it turns out that the losses caused by windstorms in Poland will increase in relative terms until 2100 by 29% in the RCP4.5 scenario and 32% in the RCP8.5 scenario. By 2050, these changes will be less significant, but still increases by 6% in RCP4.5 and 16% in RCP8.5 can be expected.